New Scientist Live and Other Talks

Posted on September 30, 2023 by Athene Donald

It’s the start of a new term in Cambridge and this weekend the streets around the city will be full of nervous looking parents trying to find somewhere to park to unpack their anxious looking children. (One of the many advantages of Churchill College is that, as an out-of-town-centre college it has far more space for parking and unloading.) This cohort, like the last several, will arrive burdened with the consequences of the pandemic and social and educational isolation in ways we have yet to discover for this particular age-group. It will be many years before the lasting effects of Covid are no longer an issue for students.

Over the summer I received a fair number of invitations to talk to different groups of students and postdocs around the University about my book, Not Just for the Boys: Why we need more women in science during the upcoming term. I am pleased to realise that the book has penetrated many different departments locally, although whether it has reached the people who might be able to act upon some of my recommendations as much as the early career researchers who have to work through the challenges, I don’t know. I could also wish such penetration were true in other universities too, that the leadership of departments look at how their staff – and indeed other students – are behaving and act accordingly. However, one only has to hear about the comments some men think it is OK to put out on air about women and whether or not they are to their taste sexually (I won’t repeat the remarks Laurence Fox made, but they were outrageous) to believe that our universities will not be exempt. They will contain men who rate the women on their courses or in their research groups not for their brains but for their bodies and convey such views in their words and actions. Of course, such harassment is common across many sectors but, if numbers start out low in subjects like engineering, physics and computing, isolation may make an unpleasant situation much harder to cope with.

This week I start the term by talking to researchers at the University School of Clinical Medicine and the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in a joint event on Monday (in person and online). At the end of the week, I go further afield to talk at New Scientist Live at Excel in London. I may have a fair idea of what sort of lecture environment I’ll be talking in for the former, but what size audience and what age and occupation distribution I will encounter for the latter is much less clear to me. Of course, one always has to respond to the audience one finds, modify the way one talks about each Powerpoint slide in the face of the faces in front of you, but public talks feel very different to the more familiar one of an academic venue. The New Scientist Live talks I believe will also be live-streamed, opening up an invisible channel to people sitting in their own homes, or potentially down the pub given I’m talking at lunchtime. Keeping remote audiences engaged is yet another challenge, but it is one that it is almost impossible to judge with what success.

With the various talks lined up for the months ahead about my book (there’ll be another one in London at the Royal Institution on November 16th), I am conscious how each organiser has put slightly different demands on me. Not just a question of audience, but of length of talk and how long to set aside for questions from the audience. Sometimes the talks are not talks but discussions, as for instance the upcoming event I will be participating in with Diane Coyle and Tabitha Goldstaub about ‘Why we need more women….’ through the Bennett Institute. Diane has written plenty about the dearth of women in her own subject of economics. What this all means is that each and every talk has to be written separately. If you think I just turn up and deliver the same talk as I have already given multiple times before, you’d be wrong. I’d be very bored if I did, and so would the audience.

I learned the hard way a long time ago, when still very early in my career and travelling, as it were, with my one and only talk (back in the day when it was hard copy transparencies and 35mm slides that were the norm), that repeating the same talk over and over again leads to a lack of attention and animation in the speaker. Sometimes, even, a complete loss of the thread of one’s words: have I said this before to this particular audience? being a particularly vicious thought as a source of confusion as one stumbles along.

The one audience I fear I am not reaching through my talks, blogs etc are teachers. I hope there will be many at New Scientist Live, but I have had no correspondence from anyone who recognizes the issues from their own schools. When I went to Parliament to meet MP Carol Monaghan(see image), a former Physics teacher from Glasgow, she recounted some of her own methods to ensure girls felt fully integrated and belonging in her classes. I wish more teachers had given the matter so much thought. Carol was a member of the Commons Science and Technology Committee which carried out an enquiry into Diversity and Inclusion in STEM, a committee chaired by Greg Clark and to which I gave evidence. The report from the committee received a bland and defensive response from the Government which did not please Clark. I wish I had a way of reaching out to teachers, as I feel they have an absolutely key part to play in encouraging more girls to follow their dreams into technology and physics.

Carol Monaghan in HoC June 23

So, talks aplenty coming up for me in the weeks ahead, along with the normal busyness of a Cambridge term. Not only do I have a talk to give about my book on Monday morning, but my last speech to Freshers after their formal welcome dinner that evening.

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Educational Disadvantage

Posted on September 1, 2023 by Athene Donald

With many schools in England apparently in danger of crumbling around or upon pupils, the start of the new school year offers the potential, once again, of being disrupted for thousands of pupils. Since the start of the pandemic in March 2020, generations of students have been impacted in ways it is hard to imagine won’t resound through the rest of their life.

This year’s A Level results combined the cohort who had not taken their GCSE exams with the retightening of grading.  (I am only writing about England, although similar implications to what follows are likely to be felt around all of the UK.) For many this will have been a disastrous combination, and teachers’ predictions have been shown often to be wide of the mark under the new grading guidelines. I think everyone understands in the abstract this group of students have not had it easy, although how that understanding will translate as their lives progress, be it at university or not, is far from clear.

However, the impact of the pandemic will not now miraculously disappear from all future schoolchildren working their way up the school ladder and, just as with future career progression for staff within universities who had to cope with pandemic fall-out, I worry the inequalities that the pandemic imposed on children living under different family circumstances, will propagate throughout their lives. If you missed the best part of a year of formal schooling just as you were beginning to learn to read, but are then presumed by the system to be a competent reader at 8, you may find yourself struggling to cope with all lessons thereafter. Will that be remembered when you sit GCSE’s in eight years time? If you and your four siblings were all squabbling over who had access to the single mobile device for your lessons, that will be an entire family whose learning will have been thrown into disarray. But will any allowance be subsequently made? What happened to all the extra tuition promised, given that much of the money has not been spent?

Those comments refer simply to the formal education that being present in a classroom might confer, but probably just as important is the disruption to a child’s developing social interactions. To be unable to mix with other children for extended periods is likely to have affected the development even of toddlers at the time, just when they were starting to understand a sense of self. Obviously, for adolescents the loss of opportunity to see friends in real life situations, rather than as a small face on a screen, will have done nothing for their own identities or ability to handle social situations. Of whatever age, I think adults too have exhibited many different manifestations of social unease from the repercussions of our long seclusion. It seems to me, in my own circle, that the after-effects of the pandemic are still very much in evidence. Everything from how often someone is expected to turn up at their place of work rather than work from home, to the use of Zoom and its like to running committee meetings, the world has changed. Sometimes I believe it has changed permanently in ways that are going to be detrimental to decision-making for all of us.

Amongst all the existential crises the world currently faces, social unease in the population is perhaps hardly top of the list of things to worry about. On the other hand, consequences of the loss of talent that poor ability to access education during the critical years of child development is something the country (and, of course, much more widely) should be very concerned about. It is something we will all have to face for an extended period. I worry people’s memories will be short. Those who had no trouble accessing online learning may not recognize the disadvantage peers may have had to contend with. The concept of excellence, of the A* star pupil who shone on the day of exams and fulfilled their teacher’s predictions, means those who come out on top may believe they are inherently superior to the kid from down the road whose educational experience was utterly different. I’m not sure what can be done about this, but I do hope people will ensure their memories are long enough to recall this societal disruption and how it has further entrenched inequality for too many in the next generation.

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Inefficiency as a Blessing in Disguise

Posted on August 20, 2023 by Athene Donald

In the process of tidying up my office I have managed to fill several large bins for recycling. I found many unremembered old reports. Indeed, sometimes I found multiple copies due to my incompetence in remembering where I filed the first one. However well-thumbed, most were by now ten or more years out of date and probably available on the web anyhow. To my surprise, I also found two files of print outs of blogposts dating back to the first couple of years I was writing (2010-12). Why I felt I needed to print them out I can no longer recall, perhaps I didn’t trust them to have a continuing life on the web, but looking through them reminded me of things I’d quite forgotten I’d written about.

One of the posts I came across was on inefficiency, something that preys on many a researcher’s mind. It is easier, to my mind, to keep pushing on with experimental work, which has its own rhythm and often the experiments dictate the timescale. It is when it comes to sitting at a desk, things get harder. For me, having multiple alternatives of the things I really ought to do, makes life easier. If I don’t feel like writing a letter of condolence to an alumnus’s widow, perhaps working my email mountain down will be better for the state of mind I’m in. If reading through some College committee paperwork does not appeal, perhaps thinking about an upcoming meeting on policy for science will feel more attractive. Having a wide range of options of what I absolutely need to do in the next few days means I can try to be as efficient as possible, by being inefficient about any single thing.

Of course, one can get caught out. I do find it irritating when half-way through a piece of writing, sometimes even half-way through a paragraph or sentence, I look at the clock and realise I should be somewhere else. To return to my computer to find a sentence beginning ‘It is obvious that….’ when it breaks off, and with no memory of what was obvious to me a couple of hours earlier, is frustrating to say the least. To avoid this, I do try to jot down (metaphorically) a few key words to remind me what I had in mind when the words were flowing to make it easier to pick up later, but too often I don’t have the forethought/time to do this.

There is another aspect to inefficiency raised by the Guardian journalist Emma Wilkins this week, that of allowing time for thoughts to mature, including when doing something totally different such as going for a walk. As she put it

‘for me, taking time out for a walk or to visit a friend doesn’t necessarily make me less productive. Where do ideas and solutions come from if not from daily life? They are just as likely to emerge when I’m hanging out the washing or walking through the bush, as when I’m staring at a screen.’

I totally agree with that too, although I don’t think of that as being inefficient so much as creating the necessary time for ideas to crystallise or for a bit of lateral thinking to come into play. Having been staring at something on the screen for far too long and heading off to boil the kettle, often allows for the space for clarity to emerge. Time to separate the wood from the trees.

To my mind, the lack of such time was one of the issues that I found hardest during the height of the pandemic, and I know I’m not alone on this. When every meeting was mediated through the computer screen, when meetings ran on the hour every hour, often with inadequate time to get to the kettle in between, let alone the bathroom, provoked utter exhaustion. A feeling of total relentlessness and lack of control over the diary while trying to do, not only the day job, but also (as the Head of a College) keep up with the changing government regulations about meeting, catering, living together. It was a period of such intensity there was no time to think ‘am I being efficient?’, it was merely a case of ‘can I finally get up off this uncomfortable desk chair?’

The changes to our ways of working seem permanent. Whereas people used to phone for 1:1 conversations but committees were in person however far the travel (of course, that did mean some people might not show at all), that is no longer so. Phoning is rare, and I realised how used I have become to seeing people through the screen when I found myself opting for a Zoom call over the phone for a call with someone I’d never met. I used to think phoning was totally adequate, yet now it seems less than satisfactory.

But whatever changes in the way we interact with others at a distance, I am sure we will all need to continue being inefficient in whatever way works for us as individuals. Plenty of coffee and comfort breaks, plenty of brief walks around the place to clear the head, switching from task to task if that helps. Being hung up on never wasting a moment is, to my mind, the best way of wasting many moments while ostensibly sticking to the job in hand.

 

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Historical Female Scientists?

Posted on August 11, 2023 by Athene Donald

One of the aspects of how my book (Not Just for the Boys: Why we need more women in science) has been received which surprises me the most, is the interest shown in the chapter on women who managed to be active in the scientific arena in centuries past. As an example, this came up in the interview I did for Nature Podcasts. I felt it was necessary to include these early women as a backdrop to the more recent past and to examine how matters have evolved, but there seems more enthusiasm for discussing these historical figures than I expected. That is all the more interesting to me as an early (pre-publication) reader said the chapter should be removed completely, as either not containing enough information or too much.

I have written previously about how I got introduced to Mary Astell, who features strongly in this historical chapter. Known as an early feminist and philosopher, who moved in the literati circles in late seventeenth century London, I was fascinated to be offered a chance to take a peek at her books and accompanying marginalia in Magdalene College’s Library, from which it was clear she had an unexplored interest in the science of the day. One of the post-publication interviewers asked me, on the back of this, whether I thought that there were many such scientifically active, or at least scientifically interested women who we know nothing about, but who are still waiting to be ‘discovered’.

Sadly, I suspect the answer is no. Whereas, as I have also written about before, it would seem that more and more female composers from past centuries are being unearthed and their music given due prominence in concert and media playlists, I don’t think significant numbers of female ‘scientists’ (bearing in mind that term only came into being in the nineteenth century) are likely to be rediscovered in the same way. Even if, lurking in some bibliophile’s library, or an august institution’s collections, are additional books with annotations which some gentlewoman had penned, similar to the sort Astell had engaged in, how likely are they to be identified and put into wider circulation, particularly if they are not part of a wider group of books of known provenance.

Furthermore, had there been such books, even if in small numbers, it seems to me they are likely to have been long since disposed of, if the woman in question was not a personage of some stature: a duchess perhaps, or the wife of someone who is well known today. But so many women of the seventeenth and eighteenth century would have had educations that ill-equipped them for forays into tomes relating to science, particularly as much would have been written in Latin, or as in Mary Astell’s annotated copy of Descartes, French or another foreign language. There may have been women who discussed scientific matters of the day with male family members in their homes, but I’m not convinced they would they have had the (foreign language) literacy and sufficient freedom from domesticity to have the time and space needed to delve into such books and write their comments?

Education for girls along these lines would have been uncommon, as not likely to lead to a good marriage and a robust financial position. Blue-stockings and salons were not a feature of the general squirearchy or wider middle classes and educating women in scientific matters would probably have been limited for most to a smattering of botany, aided by some gentle painting in watercolours of the plants they found. As an aside, I cannot imagine how young girls didn’t get completely stultified by a diet of sewing samplers, toying with the harpsichord/pianoforte and a gentle walk around the shrubbery (or perhaps I have been reading too much Jane Austen or, after a bad day at work, the lighter tales of Georgette Heyer).

Come the Victorian era, of course, things began to change, with schools that actually educated young women opening up, rather than one of the kind harshly depicted in Jane Eyre which was little more than a place to dispose of inconvenient children. Myself, I went to a school founded in 1871 for girls. And the fact that it was called Camden School for Girls (still a very good school) is indicative of its market: tradesmen’s children, as opposed to its sister school also founded by Frances Mary Buss, North London Collegiate School for Ladies. Interestingly, whereas the former has left its name unchanged since its foundation, the last word in the name of the latter has disappeared from public view. The school founded by Buss’s school contemporary Dorothea Beale* retains that same word in its name: Cheltenham Ladies College. To some, these distinctions matter, now as then.

In my book I identified a few women who had – for instance through virtue of family connections (Caroline Herschel) or place in society (Emilie du Châtelet) – been able to make inroads into the world of science. If you want a wider diet, I would point you towards books like Patricia Fara’s Pandora’s Breeches. In this book she refers to Bathsua Makin, a woman who taught the Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of Charles I. She was ardent in her calls for educational reform for women. She noted that being a housewife required many skills that might be deemed ‘scientific’. As Fara quotes from Makin:

‘To buy Wooll and Flax, to die Scarlet and Purple, requires skill in Natural Philosophy. To consider a Field, the quantity and quality, requires knowledge in Geometry, To plant a Vineyard requires understanding in Husbandry. She could not Merchandise without Knowledge in Arithmetick…’

In many ways those statements are as true in the modern world as when Makin wrote them in the seventeenth century. You’re not going to get very far in any field without ‘Arithmetick’, hence Rishi Sunak’s desire for everyone to study maths till 18. Perhaps less obviously, but relevant to getting on in today’s job market, if you are stuck at home with domestic ties such as small children, you are undoubtedly going to get better at multitasking, creativity (think Blue Peter and one hundred things you can do with a loo roll and some string) and (small) people management. These things may be hard for a woman to put in a job application, even allowing for a so-called Narrative CV, but they are nevertheless invaluable skills you may be harder pushed to pick up in a lab setting. Being a good scientist is not all about expertise gained at the bench.

*Celebrated in the anonymous poem I well remember from my school days:

Miss Buss and Miss Beale
Cupid’s darts do not feel.
How different from us
Miss Beale and Miss Buss.

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What’s Wrong with T Levels?

Posted on July 25, 2023 by Athene Donald

If you are an English reader, reading this blog, the chances are high that you studied (or are studying) A Levels before going to university. Alternative options are available post-16, but they are currently in a state of flux, whether or not you intend to go to university. Frankly, sitting outside that part of the system, it all looks a bit of a (predictable?) mess. The Government’s own flagship programme of T Levels, introduced in 2020 (T for technical) are intended to be the vocational equivalent to A Levels. They are still being introduced across the full gamut of topics, but started out in 2020 in the areas of

  • design, surveying and planning for construction
  • digital production, design and development
  • education and early years such as construction

with more topics rolled out in successive years and more still to come.

In order to prepare the student for the world of work, a mandatory part of the course was a minimum of 315 hours (around 45 days) work placement, and all the courses taught were supposed to have been developed in conjunction with employers.

In the abstract it sounds excellent but, as a recent report from Ofsted has shown, there are many problems. One of these most easily foreseen is connected with those required days of industrial placement. As the report says

The number of suitable placements is often limited in any given area because of the specific employment sector where the placement is required and the length of time students are required to attend.

Here we see regional issues raising their ugly heads. In those areas with few major employers – think Fenland or the Black Country – it will be particularly difficult for providers to source appropriate placements. Yet, to use a phrase that is barely now seen except in the name of Michael Gove’s department, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DHLUC for short), these regions are exactly those for whom levelling up is most important. Urban areas may fare better in provision, but large rural swathes of England, or former mining communities for instance, will be hard-pressed to provide appropriate on-site hours of training to fulfil the placement requirement.

Even where placements have been found, the report says:

Often employers are poorly informed about the content and structure of T Levels. In these cases, activities that students complete on industry placements are not well aligned with the T Level course content.

Things have obviously not gone to plan, if this is happening when employers were meant to be involved in the development of courses.

The reports criticisms continue: it’s been established that there is a very high drop out rate without a successful completion of the course, noting ‘In at least one provider, no students progressed from the first year of the T Level course to the second year.’ That’s a lot of wasted effort on many people’s part. The course teachers are also finding things tough, which is probably relevant to this last point. Vocational teachers, used to other formats of courses, often seem to be struggling with the more theoretical aspects, finding it hard to set work that is appropriately challenging. Staff also worry ‘that parents and school staff do not understand T Level qualifications.’ Furthermore, universities aren’t always ready to accept these qualifications, so upon completion students may end up disappointed that they hit a dead end in their specific aspirations. All these impacts combined mean it can be no surprise that institutions running the courses are finding it hard to recruit and retain the teachers to teach them.

It is of course not all bad news, with the report highlighting they found some satisfied students, employers and teachers, but overall Ofsted are clearly not impressed. What I find particularly sad is that the challenges identified were known from the outset, with many people speaking out against the reforms. The regional issues, in particular, will always have been an obvious barrier to the successful delivery of such courses, yet the Government seems to be pressing ahead with defunding BTECs (Business and Technology Education Council) at Level 3, so-called BTEC Nationals, in the hopes that T Levels may be an ‘improved’ replacement. In contrast to the last point above, universities do understand BTECs as a well-established ‘brand’, that will qualify a student for admission to many courses. With the T Level requirement of 315 hours of placement being a mandatory part of the qualification, parts of the country are simply going to have less opportunity for their young to follow a vocational path. Apprentices, after all, are no more likely to be available in these places if the employers aren’t there, so what are those for whom A Levels are not the appropriate route (or for which their GCSE grades do not qualify them) meant to do?

The UK needs a more skilled workforce, skilled at all levels. For all the apparent attention being given by the government to routes to eventual employment which don’t involve universities, for all that universities are definitely not high on the government’s list of friends, the introduction of T Levels just seems to have muddied the post-16 education waters further. It is a sad, missed opportunity and, as the Financial Times reports today in a long article about the UK’s weak productivity, our companies will continue to suffer from ‘patchy educational outcomes and skills gaps‘ in their workers, which these changes will do nothing to address.

 

 

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